Trinitarian Triumph

by Elizabeth Lev, appearing in Volume 45

The greatest strides in the history of western art have been driven by its greatest challenge: representing the divine. The Greeks achieved their classical glory representing Olympian divinities, the Egyptians raised massive pyramids to exalt their god-kings. Christianity came into being at the apex of this divine imagery, just as Augustus conferred a temple on Caesar, a man made god. Imperial patronage used visual imagery to persuade people of the reality of those gods which Christian apologist Tertullian dismissed as “nonentities… unaware of the honors paid to them.”

The Christian God, the true God, inhabited the realm of the invisible, but had erupted into human existence, and by the power of the Holy Spirit taken on a human, tangible, visible nature, and became knowable as Jesus Christ.

That this God was triune was a tremendously complex idea to present to a world accustomed to idolatry. Why would the Christians even attempt to confront this imagery? How could a human being represent something so great as the Trinitarian God?

Yet from the moment that Christ told the apostles, “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19), Christians would have to figure out how to preach of their God in three persons, and art would need to follow suit.

Christian artists rose to the challenge, from the first image of the Trinity on the fourth century “Dogmatic” Sarcophagus, today in the Vatican Museums, to Rublev’s stunning trio of angels, but depicting the Trinity as the focal point of the liturgical space as an altarpiece took some time. The Baptism of Christ served as a worthy setting for Trinitarian imagery alongside the stories of Abraham and the Three Angels, and several Roman apses featured the hand of God above a blessing Christ with an occasional dove under his feet, but it took the revolutionary humanistic vision of the Renaissance to galvanize Trinitarian altarpieces.

This artistic era, flowering in the wake of the teaching and preaching of the Scholastics, produced Western art’s most iconic Trinitarian altarpiece: the Trinity. Painted in 1426 by Tomaso di Ser Simone, known as “Masaccio,” for the Dominican church of Santa Maria Novella, this fresco holds pride of place in the history of art as one of the earliest images to be painted after the rediscovery of one-point linear perspective by Filippo Brunelleschi. Also contributing to its fame was its clamorous rediscovery in 1860 after having been covered over 300 years earlier by Giorgio Vasari.

This work, however, represents more than just a technical advance in the representation of pictorial space, it reveals the Renaissance understanding of the Trinity and its role as an image of hope during that turbulent yet fruitful age.

Masaccio's Trinity derived its iconography from a medieval image called the “Throne of Grace.” Mostly found in prayer books, the “Throne of Grace” represented God the Father behind the crucified Christ, the two linked by the Holy Spirit in the form of the dove. Masaccio’s version, at twenty-two feet by ten feet, took the hitherto page-size image and made it tower over the beholder like the Roman apse mosaics of old. Confronted with a fictive three-dimensional space, the viewer looked down a barrel vault, with coffers neatly appearing to recede in the distance. Brunelleschi, a close friend of the painter, is believed by some art historians to have personally assisted Masaccio in constructing the architectural framework for the fresco.

Several figures are painted in and around the illusionistic chapel; a man and a woman in sharp profile kneel outside the arched entrance, probably posthumous portraits of the donors. Mary, Mother of God, and John the Evangelist stand like sentinels guarding the fictive threshold. The Father is placed in the deepest part of the chapel, appearing furthest from the viewer as he holds the cross of his Son, which he proffers towards the viewer. The Holy Spirit, oddly resembling a scarf, connects the head of Christ to that of the Father.

This modified throne of glory placed the Trinity in a far more naturalistic setting than clouds or choirs of angels. The ineffable and eternal became visible in a man-made space, a new approach to thinking about the Trinity.

One-point linear perspective is a painting technique that uses a vanishing point to create a spatial grid mimicking the visual cone. This allows artists to depict relative distances between the objects and to convey a sense of nearness or remoteness to the viewer. In this case, the vanishing point evocatively draws the eye below Christ’s feet to the foot of the cross.

In front of the illusionistic chapel, Masaccio painted an altar, which originally would have been part of an actual physical altar. Under the mensa however, he painted a startlingly convincing skeleton, lying as if in an open tomb.

Little is known about the patrons, perhaps the Lenzi family, but the fresco stood above the altar facing the door to the convent’s cemetery and would have exalted beholder’s awareness of mortality. Entering the church after visiting a loved one’s grave, the viewer would be suddenly confronted with this memento mori, inscribed with the words, “What you are, I once was, what I am you will be.”

The experience of vulnerability in the face of death brought the viewer to the foot of the cross, the juncture between Christ’s sacrifice and resurrection, his conquest of death. Masaccio’s Trinity promised salvation. It did so, however, without hiding the cost.

The lifeless Christ slumps forward on the cross, body drooping, hair falling over his face, as if about to fall onto the altar below. God the Father is recessed back, slightly more remote from us, yet very much an active participant, offering up his Son through the Holy Spirit.

Mary is no dainty girl, but a heavy-set Tuscan mother, who looks almost accusingly at the viewer, while John gazes raptly upwards. Christ has truly died for our sins, and in this meticulous representation of material space, the viewer is invited to reflect on the reality of Word become flesh.

Masaccio’s use of space extols the beauty of geometry. Geometry imposes order, and the depiction of pure, unornamented space evokes the order that God maintains despite the apparent chaos of the world and the randomness of death. Masaccio’s use of perspective, meaning “seeing through,” invites the viewer to look beyond the immediacy of the world towards the divine order.

Fourteenth-century French architect Jean Mignot is credited with coining the phrase “ars sine scientia nihil est,” or “art without knowledge is nothing.” That “knowledge” was geometry. So important was this form of knowledge that medieval manuscripts pictured God himself as a geometer.

Franciscan Roger Bacon in his 1267 Opus Majus proposed geometry as an essential skill for painters, writing:

It is impossible for the spiritual sense of an object to be known without a knowledge of its literal sense but the literal sense cannot be known unless a man knows the significations of the terms and the properties of the things signified… More so when they are in the physical forms … what infinite benefit would overflow if these matters relating to geometry which are contained in scripture should be placed before our eyes in physical forms.

According to the erudite friar, most fitting subjects for geometry-based painting were God’s tabernacle with its altar and the “Throne of Mercy.”

Masaccio’s powerful blend of art and science allowed art to fulfil its triple function outlined in the second council of Nicea: 1. To instruct the faithful, 2. To recall the mysteries of the incarnation and the redemption, and 3. To excite devotion. This tripartite mission of art was, in turn, a reflection of the Trinity itself.

The development of perspective also allowed Masaccio to suggest a hierarchy of space, from beholder to donor to the participants in the story of salvation to the Trinity itself. The viewer, especially during the sacrifice of the Mass, had a sense of his or her place in the great mystery of the Trinity.

Though the fresco was rediscovered in 1860, another twenty-first-century revelation cast a literal light on the incarnational nature of the work. On June 21, 2006, art historian William Wallace photographed the fresco as sunlight entered the eastern side of the church through the rose window. Descending towards the fresco, it formed a halo around the Trinity, seeming to underscore the opening of John’s Gospel:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through him, and without him nothing came to be. What came to be through him was life, and this life was the light of the human race. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.

Wallace noted that this effect took place around the feast of Corpus Christi, celebrated especially among the Dominicans. In this light, Masaccio’s Trinity proclaims the real presence of Christ at the altar, and through the body of Christ the presence of the Trinity, a mystery expressed through the order and reason of geometry imposed on the disorder of the fallen world.